Introduction to pfSense-An Open Source Firewall
PfSense is a free, customized distribution of FreeBSD that can turn an old computer into a full featured router and firewall.
PfSense was created in 2004 as a fork of the popular m0n0wall project. The main difference between pfSense and m0n0wall is that pfSense is designed mainly to be installed on PC's instead of embedded devices which allows pfSense to offer more flexibility and features.
PfSense is very flexible and can easily be adapted to numerous applications ranging from a home router to a firewall for a large corporate network. PfSense is easy to install and maintain offering a very useful web based user interface. PfSense includes many features that are often only found in expensive commercial routers.
Popular uses for pfSense
LAN / WAN Router
Internet Cafes
Wireless Hotspot (Captive Portal)
VPN Router
Firewall
DHCP / DNS Server
Wireless Access Point
Transparent Squid Proxy Server
Multi Wan Router or Load Balancer
DNS Blacklist
Port Forwarding / NAT (Network Address Translation)
Why use pfSense instead of another router?
PfSense is fast, free, and stable offering tons of great features.
If you have an existing router that doesn't offer the features, or performance you need pfSense is a great choice to replace it with. Offering complete control of the hardware you can customize your pfSense system with the components you want.
If you've ever shopped for routers or firewall's before you probably know that depending on the features you are looking for they can be quite expensive. By using pfSense you can save a ton of money without compromising on features.